How to: Download YouTube videos in Safari
Here’s a brilliantly simple way to download YouTube videos without any additional software or using a dodgy online conversion service. So, saddle up “” you’re one simple keyboard shortcut away from downloading anything you want whenever you want.
Yesterday, Mac Blorge brought you How to: Download music from YouTube using Firefox, which is a fairly straight-forward of way getting music (or video) off YouTube and into iTunes.
But, if you’re a Safari user, here’s how get video onto your Mac without additional software or using a scary web-only (am I infected?) service.
- 1. Navigate to the YouTube video you want to download “” try Frank Caliendo riffing like a madman.
2. Press ⌘ + ⌥ + A (Choose Activity from the Window menu)
3. And, here’s the hard part “” look for the video file and double click it. Safari will download it automatically for you.
4. Find this freshly minted video in the Downloads folder > it will be named video.flv
Happily enough, this method also works with HTML5 + H.264 YouTube videos, though you’ll be looking for a dot cache file, as shown below.
Double-click it and the resulting file will dutifully appear in the Downloads folder as video.mp4.
That was pretty easy “” no fuss, no muss…
What’s your take?
via Mac OS X Hints
March 4th, 2010
Cool, as I am an exclusive Safari user.
May 16th, 2010
This used to work, but not any more. For the past few weeks the downloaded file has been appearing under the filename “videoplayback” without any extension.
Double clicking on it does nothing now, iTunes doesn’t recognize it, and when I try to open it from within QuickTime, I get the message “This is not a movie file.” The only thing that opens it is VLC, but it doesn’t seem to know how to convert it into a file that any other app can read.
Something has changed in the way YouTube is encoding. Can you help?
May 16th, 2010
“Double-click it and the resulting file will dutifully appear in the Downloads folder as video.mp4.”
I’ve tried this and it shows up in my downloads folder as a videoplayback file with no extension. Clicking on the file brings up a bunch of gibberish text. Re-naming the file with a video extension results in a message that the file is not a video file.
Any suggestions?
May 17th, 2010
Open the file in QuickTime 7 and export as the file type you want.
June 5th, 2010
in the html5 version of youtube, i do it like you said to, and it opens another website with the video on a black background, how do you download the video when this happens?
June 15th, 2010
Daniel: Hold down the option-key when you double-click the link and it will save it to downloads instead of open it in a new tab/window.
August 27th, 2010
Hello, can you tel me plz, how to download Youtube HTML5 Videos on my Safari MAC OSx
February 8th, 2011
This no longer works. All it does is restart the vid on youtube. Nothing appears at all in my download folder
April 13th, 2011
It’s better to use online video downloaders, which can download online movies in a couple of clicks. You can use YouTube downloader or Elmedia Player PRO, which can save all online videos, not only videos from YouTube.
April 13th, 2011
NO, it’s not. Online downloaders are riddled with spyware and buggy as sin.
Eltima is notorious for these issues.